Bhagavad Gita
Krishna's teaching to Arjuna on a battlefield: the structure of the eighteen chapters, what the argument actually is, and how to read it.
The Bhagavad Gita is seven hundred verses set on a battlefield at the moment before the fighting starts, in which a warrior refuses to fight and his charioteer talks him back. The Bhagavad Gita sits inside the Mahabharata as a single episode and has been read as a standalone scripture for at least a thousand years.
Its authority is unusual. It is smriti by classification, remembered rather than heard, and yet it functions as shruti in practice: Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva all wrote commentaries on it, and a commentary on the Gita became the way a philosopher announced a school.
Part of that reach comes from its refusal to settle. It gives the case for action, for knowledge, and for devotion, and readers have found their own preferred answer in it ever since. Gandhi read it as a text about non-violence, on a battlefield.
These pages set out the structure, the argument, and how to read it.